We hear repeatedly how valuable it is to have a space dedicated to practical guidance, real world examples, and direct access to product experts. Monday Masterclass Season 2 builds on the essentials while introducing capabilities that help organizations scale their employee communications and community strategy with confidence.
This year’s program includes four live sessions that “go beyond the basics” with advanced guidance, smarter workflows, AI powered tools, and a strong focus on reach, relevance, and connection.
Below, I'll recap highlights from our first session: Week 1 – Beyond the Basics
Notifications: Relevance, Not Noise
We kicked off with one of the most influential parts of the employee experience: notifications. We dive deep into how notifications function across Teams, mobile, email, and the inapp bell, and why smart delivery matters now more than ever.
A few standout insights:
- Smart Notifications, now rolling out, intelligently determines for a community announcement the primary channel a user engages with most—and only move to a secondary one if the message hasn’t been consumed.
- Delivery respects all user preferences while reducing inbox and device clutter.
- Scenarios like community announcements, @mentions, new storyline posts, and replies all benefit from this “rightchannelfirst” intelligence.
The theme is clear: precision beats volume, and great communicators design with this in mind.
📘 Learn more:
Digests: The Daily & Weekly Visibility Engines
We clarified the value of Engage’s digests:
- Daily Digest: Prioritizes leadership content, helping key updates cut through everyday noise.
- Weekly Digest: Highlights content users may have missed—an intentional discovery channel driven by organizational signals, relevance, and trending topics.
- Featured Conversations: Remain one of the strongest tools for ensuring important posts persist across both digests.
For communicators, this is a massive lever. Digests reach audiences who aren’t actively checking their feed—and do so with content tailored to individual interests.
📘 Learn more:
The Home Feed: Built In Personalization
The Home Feed continues to be the front door of Viva Engage, and we unpacked the ranking signals and influence pathways that shape what employees see. Key factors include:
- Community membership
- Past interactions
- Organizational signals
- Relationships
- Featured conversations, announcements, and mute behavior
- AI-driven relevance scores
We also outlined the tactics different roles can use to influence the feed, whether through featured posts, dynamic membership, leadership participation, or simply encouraging lightweight employee engagement (react, reply, follow, join). This section reinforced that the feed isn’t random, it’s an engine, and every role has influence.
📘 Learn more:
Content & Contributors: How Everyone Shapes Reach
We dive into Content creation, the anatomy of a post and how to use Copilot to enhance your posting! We walked through different post types and we broke them down by persona, showing how each contributes to Engage. For example:
Corporate Communicators
- Publish announcements
- Feature conversations
- Pin posts
- Review analytics
Network & Community Admins
- Manage community configuration
- Set dynamic membership
- Mark official communities
- Shape governance
- Assign experts
- Add Community agent
Employees
- Favorite communities
- Interact to improve their own feed relevance
- Post, reply, react, and contribute to knowledge flow
Each role meaningfully impacts network health, visibility, and culture.
📘 Learn more:
Moderation & Governance: A Modernized Approach
We walked through the playbook with guidance on scalable governance practices:
- Keyword monitoring and Report a Conversation help route safety signals to the right reviewers.
- AI-powered theme moderation understands context—not just keywords—and enables proactive detection.
- Move Conversation capabilities ensure discussions land in the right place.
- View only mode supports sensitive or read only scenarios.
Together as well as the others we walked through allow admins to encourage respectful networks without slowing down participation.
📘 Support documentation:
The Community Management Toolkit
We introduced a rich set of tools for community managers, including:
- Copilot powered prompts for conversation starters, announcements, and event planning
- Engagement tactics to keep communities vibrant
- Post types (Questions, Praise, Polls, Articles) and their ideal uses
- Anatomy of a high performing post
- “Good → Better → Best” content comparisons
These resources help community managers evolve beyond day to day posting and into strategic facilitation.
AI in Viva Engage: A New Era of Engagement
This year’s masterclass marks a fundamental shift: AI is now woven into nearly every part of the Viva Engage experience. We walk through how Copilot assists:
Before you post
- Predicting questions your audience will ask
- Locating vague or unclear language
- Adding calls to action
- Making messages more engaging
After you post
- Summarizing comment threads
- Identifying themes and patterns
- Pulling sentiment cues
- Drafting recaps for stakeholders
For moderators
- Brainstorming keyword lists
- Creating response plans
- Tracking usage trends
- Drafting workflows
Across all these scenarios, AI reduces busy work so communicators and admins can focus on clarity, connection, and culture.
A Day in the Life: Copilot + Viva Engage
We also included a behind the scenes look at how our team uses Copilot and Viva Engage throughout the day to manage customer communities, identify top themes, draft content, and stay ahead of fastmoving conversations. It’s a practical illustration of how AI and human insight work together to scale impact.
What’s Next
Week 2 of the Masterclass, AI-Powered Engagement! We will dive deeper into Copilot in Engage, Community Agent, Copilot Community and activation strategies. If Week 1 was about how the system works, Week 2 is about how to amplify what you do with it.
You can register for upcoming sessions and explore the full schedule here:
https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Masterclass
Microsoft